The Day After Tomorrow

by Bill Henry on May.28, 2004, under Bill Henry's Movie Reviews

Bill’s Review

For anyone who doubts that we are well into the summer blockbuster season in which each weekend will see the release of some new visual effects-laden popcorn chomper, we have the opening of The Day After Tomorrow. This disaster movie from the folks that gave us Independence Day and Godzilla masquerades as an environmental social action call to arms, but its call to stop global warming is a far runner-up to its snapshot view of the state of computer-generated special effects. Its primary purpose is to separate you from as much of your money as it can manage. If you have any doubts of the movieâ€™s true nature, keep this in mind: A movie that warns of world-wide disaster due to manâ€™s inaction on global warming and takes merciless jabs at the current administration is a movie funded by and prominently displaying the corporate siblings of 20th Century Fox and the News Corp. That is correct. Loyal Republican Rupert Murdoch underwrites this pro-ecology, anti-Bush movie. I am reminded of a quote by the second funniest Marx Brother, Karl, who said that a capitalist will sell you the cream pie that you hit him in the face withâ€¦ or something like that.
In the very near future (the day after tomorrow one might say), paleo-climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid headlining his second big bucks ensemble piece in as many months) has noticed that there is something funny going on with the weather. While checking core samples in Antarctica, his team barely escapes when a Rhode Island-sized chunk of the polar ice cap breaks off. At a global warming conference (where it is snowing in New Delhi), Jack warns the assembled that climate change and greenhouse gas build-up could even bring about a new ice age (global warming melts the polar ice caps, alters the salinity of the Atlantic, halts the ocean currents, and thus, new ice age).
And faster than you can say, â€œeven Ed Begley, Jr. thinks this is a load of hooey,â€ super storms have dumped snow everywhere, New York City is submerged under a wall of water (inconveniently trapping Hillâ€™s son, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, in the New York Public Library), said water is frozen solid, Los Angeles is ripped apart by a series of twisters, and the U.S. populace is hightailing it for the Mexican border. So what is Jackâ€™s strategy in all of this? He is going to hike from Washington, D.C. to NYC to rescue his son (oh, he starts out in a truck, but it is the sort that is going to need refueling in Delaware and all the gas stations are under ten feet of snow). And he is doing all this despite the â€œfactâ€ that he knows that within the eye of these super storms is super-frozen air that will freeze you in your tracks (one of the more outlandish things in a movie that is composed of little else).
Evan as the characters are doing one dumb thing after another, it is still a ton of fun and enjoyable while you are enduring it. And you will feel the cold so deeply that you do not even feel it once you leave the theatre and re-emerge into the reality of Washingtonâ€™s 90-degree heat and 90 percent humidity. I am not bothered by the casual irreligiousness of the movie because that would be taking this silly stuff seriously and that is just what they want. The science on display seems mostly balderdash. Leaving aside the seemingly counterintuitive question of whether global warming can cause an ice age (Waterworld seems carefully thought out by comparison). The most likely explanation is that they wanted to make an ice age movie, but Hollywoodâ€™s ecology wing is so wed to the theory of global warming as scientific certainty that the filmmakers felt they had to wed the two. And although the movie pays lip service to the knowledge that climate change evolves over eons, they skate right over any objections to get the movie done. Unfortunately, the day after tomorrow is slated to be hot, humid, and hazyâ€”just like today.
However, the most outlandish moment in the movie comes when the Dick Cheney-esque vice president admits that he was wrong about global warming and says he is sorry. Quite frankly, the globe could turn into an ice ball or the Gobi Desert and you would be more likely to see Halliburton Dick sprout wings out of his back and fly to the moon than admit he was wrong and admit that environmentalists were right about global warming. There are just some things that Hollywood cannot expect us to swallow.